(Chris Parker, Headline USA) The FBI’s controversial raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home may have been orchestrated to protect the agency from incriminating documents.
Trump was believed to be in possession of binders that he ordered to be “declassified to the maximum extent possible.” His order also noted the FBI‘s objection to the declassification, reported The Republic Brief.
Those documents contained details about Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s conspiracy to spread disinformation about collusion between Trump and Russian hackers. The “evidence” of that collusion played a crucial role in Trump’s impeachment hearings.
A barrage of evidence has linked the FBI to election interference during the 2020 general elections. As of election day in 2020, many of those documents still had not been released to Congress or the public.
Trump’s order sought to change that. Section 1 specifically stated:
“At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.”
Mark Meadows, Trump’s Chief of Staff, admitted that federal agencies often illegally defied or stalled Trump’s orders. That defiance impacted the release of the information contained in binders using the Privacy Act, a law that does not apply to the White House.
“The DOJ had already made redactions to protect sources & methods, and returned the binder back to the White House. But the corrupt FBI also wanted to hide names. So at the last minute, the DOJ demanded the binder comply with the 1974 Privacy Act,” wrote Jim Hoft at the Gateway Pundit.
“The Act requires any “agency” that releases records to also hide personal or identifiable name information. The DOJ knew this Act doesn’t apply to the White House, it was a stall tactic. The courts decided this 22 years ago that the Privacy Act was based around FOIA requests, and the White House is not an agency,” Hoft wrote.
